06: Women In Manufacturing - with Meaghan Ziemba

Meet Meaghan:Meaghan is the host of the Mavens of Manufacturing Podcast which celebrates women in manufacturing from the shop floor to the C-suite. She interviews some amazing guests on her show and has been an advocate for women in manufacturing, and has been working to attract people of all ages to the manufacturing industry. She is also the owner and founder of Z-Ink Solutions which is a copywriting and copy editing service that provides impactful text and memorable storytelling for a variety of brands and industries. Lori: Meaghan, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself?Meaghan: Yeah, so I thank you again for inviting me to your podcast. I'm really excited for the conversation. And anytime I get to share, you know, news about Mavens or Z-Ink, I get really excited about it because a lot of people know me through mavens, and not so much Z, which is actually the first thing I started before Mavens. So I'm a technical writer by trade. I have a master's and bachelors. I said that backward, but that's okay. A bachelor's and master's degree in professional and technical writing. I am a UWM, which is the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, alum. So when I left high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I have that typical story where my parents pressured me into going into college. And I always tested well with writing and storytelling, my English teacher, I was the favorite almost always, in all of my English classes. My sister got the math gene, I got the word gene. So it's kind of funny to have us in a room together because she'll spout out numbers and I have no idea what she's talking about. But, um, when I got into college, I was spiraling kind of out of control. And then I ended up getting pregnant with my daughter and decided to move back to Wisconsin I found out about professional and technical writing and my teacher gave us a great assignment on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And there were like 12 to 15 students within that class and he went through each of our instructions and had 12 to 15 different end results, which was really interesting. It opened up my eyes to how information is interpreted differently across different people and cultures and even countries. So when I graduated, I started out in the trade publication industry and learned about engineering and manufacturing that way, and it was a lot of fun. And then a lot of different people learned about their passions and why they were in the sector. And I tried to get out of it and go into higher education and do some marketing for higher education but I got really bored out of my mind. So I decided to get back into engineering and manufacturing and work for several companies within their marketing departments. But even with that opportunity, I had a lot of fun, but I really missed getting to know different people in different areas. And I loved going to trade shows because it gave me an opportunity to actually meet different people from different companies and learn their stories. And I tried to take what I learned from them, and apply it to the companies that I worked for, to get people really excited about some of their products and stuff. Because if you're engineering or manufacturing, not everything is really exciting. Some of it is really technical and boring. So you got to find that, that hard string that you can pull for people. So I talked to my husband, and I was like, Hey, do you care if I start my own freelance company, because I feel like that's gonna actually feed into everything that I love doing. I can work with different people at this time, are Simon, my 18-year-old daughter, and then we have two toddlers. And I was like, this way I can pick my hours and I can be home more for them, and not have to leave, I can keep my office at home and be able to do that work-life balance that I've craved so much. He's like, Yeah, go